Musings of a black woman living in one of the nation's whitest states

It is over, so very over and in the end America must accept that she is not the nation she once was, times have changed. Obama will have another four years in office and while many people including yours truly are feeling pretty good about that; for many millions of Americans this morning they are shaking their heads in dismay.

In the end I am not convinced that Obama won again because he was awesome but more because the alternative was stuck in a time warp and many of us simply had no desire to get back in the way-way machine.

When your only strategy is to stir up ugliness, it will eventually backfire on you. In the end the GOP has shown itself to be increasingly disconnected from America in 2012. America is more than Christian heterosexual white men (and women), America is a diverse salad bowl filled with people of all stripes and colors. Oddly enough all these diverse people do not think the same no matter what the GOP would like to think, believe it or not, Black people can be some of the most socially conservative folks around (Black preachers and gay marriage anyone?). Yet even with all that diversity most of us are not interested in having leaders who openly disregard us. We aren’t self-deporting, shutting our own uterus’s down or any of that nonsense.

America is at a crossroads, it happens to all of us, when we reach that point where we need to decide to make changes. Despite Obama’s win, one look at the electoral map shows that there are large chunks of America where being a Black person this morning might not be too good while people process this lost.

Yet in order to have true growth, we need to have a willingness to get raggedy and name our demons so that we can truly move on. In the end I am not sure how realistic that is, but a changing demographic in America means that the old ways of being don’t work anymore.

So while there are many winners this morning and I congratulate them, I can’t help but feeling we still lost and that until the majority of Americans truly accept that the face of America is a gorgeous tapestry, this ride will be rocky.

One thought on “Nope, we ain’t riding in the way back machine…”

Yes. Things will not get better til we can stop relying on scare tactics and use reason to be less divisive But it looks like that won’t happen as long as we have such biased and polarized 24hrs media. They’re fanning the flames, drawing the line, more clearly defining the lines between “us and them.” And the 24hrs media is mostly doing this in the name of killing time and staying alive. But there are no clear lines, and choosing sides only leads to enemies and hate. We are human beings, we are a mix of ideas, and we will always have more in common than we will have in difference. Which is what we forget as we alienate each other. But we should at least be free to change our minds any time we like, not be pressured into thinking what others think ad infinitum, often using fear to bolster the effort, instead of information. It is only thru the use of fear do we become more extreme versions of ourselves. Exaggerations. Caricatures. Often full of spite and resentment. And when that happens some of our humanity is lost. And we take one step back for every 1.2 steps forward.